Abstract

Cultural comparisons enjoy increasing popularity in economics. Since cultural comparison must abandon random allocation to treatments, it is unclear whether differences found between countries can be attributed to country characteristics or are merely driven by differences in subject pools. In experiments in two Chinese cities and at two campuses in Ethiopia, we show that within-country differences are negligible. Differences between the two countries, on the other hand, are large.

Keywords

Risk attitudes Cultural comparison Experimental economics

We are indebted to Haileselassie Medhin, Xiangdong Qin, Shuwen Li, Eva Xie, Jing Yu, and Jiang Chong for help with the translations of questionnaires and the execution of the experiments. All errors remain ours.